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Deconstruction is Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Elisabeth Weber

Extract

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This provocative assertion, sharply contrasting with the decades-old criticism of deconstruction as an aesthetisizing apolitical and ahistorical exercise, recapitulated in 1989 the stakes of an infinite task and responsibility that, in spite of and because of its infinity, cannot be relegated to tomorrow: “[…] justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. It is that which must not wait.” It is in the spirit of such urgency, of a responsibility that cannot be postponed, that Jacques Derrida was an active and outspoken critic and commentator on issues such as South Africa's Apartheid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and on what Richard Falk has termed “the great terror war”.

Type
Articles: Special Issue: A Dedication to Jacques Derrida – Justice
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 1: Articles: Special issue - A Dedication to Jacques Derrida , 01 January 2005 , pp. 179 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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2 Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (2002).Google Scholar

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